Representing the Underrepresented

Abstract

In recent years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has bolstered its diversity efforts, and in 2021 they announced a new equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) plan to be implemented through 2025, designed to better serve underrepresented groups in Canadian media. Throughout the past decade, CBC has made multiple efforts to increase EDI practices throughout its organization. However, scholarship has identified the limitations of previous policies in making a meaningful impact, and research documenting the underrepresentation of diverse groups in Canadian news media is almost non-existent. The objective of this study is to acquire a deeper understanding of how CBC News programming reflects Canada’s current cultural diversity by studying how diverse groups are represented in CBC News programming. To measure this, a two-week content analysis of written and televised CBC News was conducted, which explored and categorized emergent themes in the representation of diverse Canadians and the journalists who cover diverse stories. The data revealed CBC's extensive coverage of Indigenous communities and a commitment to empowering diverse journalists with the opportunity to tell such stories about the communities to which they belong. To further investigate the latter phenomenon, a discourse analysis of diverse stories written by self-identifying journalists was conducted. This section highlighted how self-identifying journalists incorporate personal experience to tell more impactful stories about the communities they identify with. Finally, this report illuminates potential oversights in CBC’s coverage of underrepresented groups in news media. This report encourages CBC to conduct an internal organizational review to evaluate how they can improve news coverage of underrepresented groups before the conclusion of their current EDI plan in 2026, suggesting the continued empowerment of self-identifying journalists and including more diverse perspectives into the newsfeed as potential solutions.